The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Wireless mobile devices (e.g., user equipment, or “UE” devices) may communicate with each other over a wireless wide area network (“WWAN”), e.g., using licensed wireless spectrums. “Licensed” wireless spectrums may be reserved for WWAN radio access technology (“RAT”) such as the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (“LTE”) Release 10 (March 2011) (the “LTE Standard”), the IEEE 802.16 standard, IEEE Std. 802.16-2009, published May 29, 2009 (“WiMAX”), as well as any other wireless protocols that are designated as 3G, 4G, 5G, and beyond.
Some mobile devices may be configured to communicate directly with other mobile devices, e.g., via device-to-device (“D2D”) communication. D2D communication may be used, e.g., when mobile devices initiate communication with each other while within direct wireless range of each other. D2D communication may be implemented using licensed or unlicensed wireless spectrum. RATs that may use unlicensed wireless spectrums may include 802.11 (“WiFi”), BlueTooth, near field communication (“NFC”), FlashLinq by Qualcomm®, and so forth. In various embodiments, mobile devices may utilize WiFi Direct to discover and establish direct D2D communication links with other mobile devices. If mobile devices move out-of-range from each other during D2D communication, session continuity may be lost.
Devices may initiate communication with each other while remote from each other over a WWAN, e.g., using licensed wireless technologies, but then move into proximity of each other. Continuing to using WWAN resources to communicate while within proximity of each other may drain WWAN resources that may be put to better use for communications between mobile devices that are remote from each other.